Defending the Thesis

I knew a man his brain so small
He couldn't think of nothin' at all
He's not the same as you and me
He doesn't dig poetry, he's so unhip that
When you say Dylan, he thinks you're talkin' about Dylan Thomas
Whoever he is
The man ain't got no culture

I been Mick Jaggered, silver daggered
Andy Warhol, won't you please come home?
Been Roy Haleed and Art Garfunkeled
I just discovered somebody's tapped my phone
Folk rock
I've lost my harmonica, Albert 

~A Simple Desultory Philippic

As some of you are aware, I go to graduate school. This week I defended the thesis. You can look back at older posts on the blog for more info about what I say about graduate school. This post will be short. There will of course be longer posts in the future, probably about one of those topics of iconoclasm, delivered in the form of a desultory philippic. 

Now it would be great if I could say that the thesis that I wrote made some meaningful impact on the world. It didn't. You can usually tell how monumental someone's thesis is by the length of the title. This is at least true in math. If someone has a thesis entitled Tensors, then you can know that they had an important thesis. On the other hand, if the title of their thesis was Recursive Methods for the Development of Categorization Techniques of Geometric Lie Subgroups Over Manifolds of Low Dimension and Non-compact Support,  you can know right away that the thesis was written just so that the person could graduate. If they were feeling especially daring, perhaps this long-thesis-title-writing person even put some hidden gems in the text of the most boring chapter. This way if someone is reading the thesis (40 years later, only in the name of science) and comes across the phrase "This finding is important because it means that mountain trolls actually do exist. Two of them ate the squash from my garden," the reader's life will not have been entirely wasted.

Five whole pages of my thesis are devoted solely to computer output. Another 22 pages are just pictures. But they are not interesting pictures. Here is one of them:

This is one of the more interesting pictures mind you. We were pretty happy to actually find a way to make the picture be in color.

I did wonder how insanely boring it must be to be on a thesis committee. Your job consists of reading every insipid detail about some banal topic, then pretending to actually understand what you read. During my presentation I actually saw one of the committee members with his eyelids drooping.  This probably actually played to my advantage as it meant he was limited in terms of what types of questions he was able to ask because he was slipping into a coma.

Before I defended the thesis the college sent me a packet of documents I had to fill out. By about page 46 I stopped reading what I was signing. Without knowing it I probably signed a document stating I was a mountain troll and ate someone's squash.